Following the recent Atlanta and Colorado shootings, one SUNY Oswego professor is sharing her insight on how COVID-19 has shaped the way in which lockdown drills are performed.
Dr. Jaclyn Schildkraut, a criminology professor at SUNY Oswego and a national expert on mass shootings, said lockdown drills have pretty much looked the same since they started being practiced after Columbine, although there are different variations of emergency preparedness and active shooter protocols. These variations have emerged over the years through various initiatives from the Department of Homeland Security, families of students killed in school shootings and private for-profit corporations.
From a policy perspective, Schildkraut added, there have not been really any changes; there is no federal guidance on lockdown drills, leaving the decision up to the states in terms of the requirements for the number of drills to be conducted.
“The importance of practicing drills is to build muscle memory,” Schildkraut said. “In stressful situations, our thinking may be compromised but our bodies will do what they have been trained to do, drills help us to build those skills so that we respond how we need to in order to stay safe in stressful situations.”
While COVID-19 has presented challenges for drills in the sense that during a drill in normal conditions everyone would huddle together in a safe space out of sight, the modifications Schildkraut and her team have implemented do not impact response efforts. By being mindful of health and safety simultaneously, students, faculty and staff are still getting their practice in, Schildkraut said.
“Being in super close proximity in the pandemic presents challenges for potentially contracting COVID-19,” Schildkraut said. “How we have approached it is you deal with the immediate threat. During drills, that is COVID, so we have the schools we work with practicing in a modified way that incorporates social distancing and mask wearing. If there was an active shooter, however, that is a more immediate threat than COVID-19, so everyone would get out of sight by whatever means necessary in such a situation.”
In fact, Schildkraut had recently been putting this new approach to the test with schools in the Syracuse area assisting in evaluating their effectiveness in responding to school shooting scenarios during the pandemic.
“While they are given brief insight into why those response calls may be made, we focus more on the ‘how’ than the ‘why,’” Schildkrat said. “The reality is that in the more than 13 years children are in schools, they can face one or more of many different types of emergencies. We want to make sure they have the tools to stay safe in any scenario.”
In their most recent study, Schildkraut and her team found that educators generally viewed their schools as safe and participating in lockdown drills and training did not alter these feelings; what they did change was how prepared they felt, she said.
“Teachers, who normally participated in fire and lockdown drills, didn’t feel significantly more prepared for these two emergencies but did for lockouts and holds,” Schildkraut said. “Staff members, who often don’t actively participate in the drills, felt more prepared to respond in all five scenarios after going through training and the second drill. So it highlights the importance of the training component.”
Schildkraut emphasizes that a distinction has to be made as K-12 schools and colleges or universities cannot be treated as one in the same because they have very different challenges for how to respond to emergencies. This is largely because of environmental issues like campus layouts and number of buildings, she said.
However, Schildkraut said that the biggest change that is needed from both lawmakers and the public more broadly is to focus on being proactive rather than reactive.
“We are three weeks out from the Colorado shooting and no one is even talking about it anymore,” Schildkraut said. “Instead, everyone just moved on like it didn’t happen, but will somehow be surprised when the next one happens. We need to be talking now about how to prevent the next tragedy rather than waiting for it to come and then figuring out how to respond or react to it.”
Photo Provided by Jaclyn Schildkraut
